The Stack Overflow Age • Hacker News Board

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#81

Post by klenwell » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 5:39 PM UTC

Ajedi32 wrote: post #66

aepiepaey wrote: post #53

Stack Overflow is useful at times, and frustrating at others. If you have basically no idea what you're doing, or just want an example for something, it can be great. On the other hand, if you try to find an answer about something you're really knowledgeable about, the result is often unsatisfactory: Like trying to find the reference documentation to answer some specific question, and the documentation is buried unde…

Yes, once you start asking _really_ difficult questions that require in-depth knowledge of a niche topic to answer SO becomes less useful, since the pool of people who know enough to actually answer your question is too small. In cases like that I usually just end up answering my own question later, after I've figured it out by other means.

This is actually one of the use cases I really like. I'll often deliberately add a question with an answer if I think it is something I'll use again in future and is not found somewhere else obvious on the web.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#82

Post by klenwell » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

peacetreefrog wrote: post #79

I think Stack Overflow is great and it's helped me a lot in the past, but I'm not sure how useful it'll be in the future. I've been learning Elm the past few weeks and have noticed a lack of good SO questions and answers on it. It's a smaller community, but I also think many people go to the Elm Slack channel to ask their questions, which they get in realtime. Not sure if that's just an Elm thing. A language specific…

Sounds like an opportunity for someone to pick up some SO karma. Just try not to spend it all in one place.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#83

Post by zwieback » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 5:48 PM UTC

klenwell wrote: post #80

Someone1234 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot help but read "beginners" in a derogatory tone. Or at the very least a way to hand-wave away the unhealthy atmosphere that has formed at SO. It is definitely a problem for people with low SO Reputation since others can come along and edit their posts completely changing the context and meaning, and seem more brave to bully low rep users (e.g. delete/dup their posts). I have fairly high SO Rep from way-back-w…

For my last two jobs, I've created a new SO account for that job. I'm a pretty experienced user with decent reputation on my main account. I think I'm a pretty good question writer. I do my research beforehand, pay attention to niceties like formatting and grammar, and try to provide the right amount of context. My first couple questions almost immediately get downvoted without explanation. Comparable questions from…

Great experiment, that helps further the discussion and I hope Joel and Jeff see this. What you're finding is a real concern and of course we see it in discussion forums in general but I was hoping the SO community would be better.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#84

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

megaman22 wrote: post #71

nmstoker wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The perception of a culture problem on SO seems quite strong with a few people here. I'm sure bad things happen but it always seemed a) fairly rare and b) a price worth paying.... Without it, it would be like the Qlikview forums in no time! ;-)

I always wonder if people that complain about SO being nasty missed out on the shitshow that was programming forums before the current era. I recall some monumental flamewars back in the day on various sites I used to frequent.

[deleted]

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#85

Post by marktangotango » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 5:54 PM UTC

And, also: we’re just a few weeks away from launching Stack Overflow Teams, the biggest upgrade to Stack Overflow ever, so that’s going to be really cool.

Ah that explains firing up the old blog editor again content marketing ftw!

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#86

Post by fhood » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 6:01 PM UTC

ken wrote: post #72

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[2] isn't an example of "subjective editorial decisions"; your question was off-topic because 'recommendation' questions are prohibited. For that tho, there's a Stack Exchange sister site: - [Software Recommendations Stack Exchange]( https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ ) I don't like that 'decision', i.e. to not allow recommendations, but I understand the reasoning behind it, that recommendation questions are bas…

I never understood it, either. By that reasoning, almost any technical question is an "opinion" question asking for a "recommendation". For example, pretty much any question about C string handling has many possible answers, e.g., [1] admits that comparing two strings is "rather broad" and the various answers there recommend looping over each index and comparing chars with ==, sscanf, strncmp, regexes, and PEGs. Opin…

Also there seems to be no problem with users who submit opinions instead of answers.

Q: How do I do X extremely specific thing that I need because I have an unusual case that needs this specific thing.

A (top voted): Why would you want to do X? You shouldn't do that. I clearly know more about your problem than you do because I assume everyone on here is a college student and not a developer working with a large mostly static codebase. You should do Y instead. It is much better.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#87

Post by mark-r » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 6:10 PM UTC

kaycebasques wrote: post #57

aepiepaey wrote: post #53

Stack Overflow is useful at times, and frustrating at others. If you have basically no idea what you're doing, or just want an example for something, it can be great. On the other hand, if you try to find an answer about something you're really knowledgeable about, the result is often unsatisfactory: Like trying to find the reference documentation to answer some specific question, and the documentation is buried unde…

> Or you find someone who asked exactly the question you're looking for an answer to, but it either: has no answer, despite being very old “Who were you, DenverCoder9? What did you see?!” https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/wisdom_of_the_ancients.png

You should really link to the actual cartoon page instead of just the image. Not only do you get links to the rest of the site but the hover text is almost always worth seeing.

https://xkcd.com/979/

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#88

Post by grkvlt » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 6:10 PM UTC

zeveb wrote: post #68

> In the early days of the Internet, before the Web, there was a system called Usenet which created primitive online discussion forums. I wouldn't call Usenet groups 'primitive online discussion forums'; indeed, I rather strongly believe that in most respects Usenet was better & more advanced than current technologies. It was fast . How fast? Really, really fast: every article was already sitting on your local system…

I think there's some rose-coloured reviewing going on here.

> It was fast [...] easy [...] you were in control [etc.]

Not that I recall. It was slow, and could take from hours (local organisation or same city) to days (rest of the world) for an article to be propagated on Usenet. Yes, it was all cached locally, but often systems would download new articles only once a day, often at night when bandwidth (scarce and expensive, costing 'hundreds, if not thousands of dollars' as the rn warning went) was available. Conversations didn't take place in anything near real-time, but over days.

It didn't have history, or archives, either. Binary newsgroups would be kept for days only (due to their size) while the 'alt' hierarchy was kept for longer and the 'big 7' longest (eventually multiple years, but originally only months, causing the loss of many early Usenet postings that were never archived.)

As for moderation and accountability, moderated newsgroups were controlled by people who could choose whether or not to accept articles, and the creation of a new group, even in the 'alt' hierarchy was at the whim of some news administrator, while the 'big 7' required the 'Usenet Cabal' to agree, after a voting process that while democratic was complex and confusing.

Actually getting access to a group required your local news administrator to decide whether it was worth the disk space and bandwidth, so there was no guarantee that you would see every group or message.

As for full-text search over the entire newsfeed, Kibo was famous for this because it was rare. Searching news was difficult and time and compute resource hungry; most people did not have the resources to accomplish this.

The Web is a "version of Usenet, with encryption, authentication & Unicode, and capable of scaling up to 7 billion people" plus interactivity, colour, images, video, hypertext, programmable extensibility, you name it...

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#89

Post by baud147258 » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 6:19 PM UTC

maxxxxx wrote: post #70

aw3c2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> discussing SO is not for discussion!

If SO not for discussion is there a forum where you can discuss broad software architecture? Something with a spirit like HN where not everything is on topic but usually discussions are respectful and interesting.

I think that one of the other site of the stackexchage network, https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/, does that

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#90

Post by cptaj » Fri, Apr 06, 2018, 6:19 PM UTC

zwieback wrote: post #34

It's interesting to see all the negative comments about the SO culture here. I just hadn't really noticed it but maybe it is a problem for beginners. I generally find what I'm looking for and when I post a question I try to research first to avoid spam. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?

It absolutely is. I've always had positive experiences research and asking questions in SO. You just need to put a little bit of effort into the question and it will be fine